Google’s Chinese wake-up call

On Monday, Google made good on its promise
to stop censorship of its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, by rerouting
viewers to its unfettered Hong
Kong site. According to the company’s chief legal officer, David
Drummond, the move was “a sensible solution to the challenges we've
faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information
for people in China.”

While Google failed to gather any solidarity from other
foreign corporations in China, free speech advocates (including
CPJ) hailed the move as a rare instance of a corporation putting principles
above market share. But now that it’s a done deal, what will the real impact
be, both for Google and for the cause of Internet freedom in China? It’s too
soon to tell, of course, and we are in fact at the beginning, not the end of
the story. But one impact is already clear: Google’s move has helped wake people
in China up to the extent to which access to information has been controlled by
their government.

Blogger and Internet entrepreneur Isaac Mao estimates that two
years ago, only 5 percent of Chinese Internet users knew that the Web they saw
was censored. Today, about 20 percent of netizens know the term “scaling the wall,”
or utilizing censorship circumvention technologies, and “have a strong
determination to do so,” Mao says. The prevalence of news reports about Google
in the past two months has only increased those numbers. In an open letter to
both Google and the Chinese government asking for more transparency in the
process and laws of Internet censorship, a group of Chinese Internet users wrote:
“Chinese netizens are increasing not only in number, but progressively in their
wits as well. We are clearly conscious of our rights and desire for the global
information and human knowledge equally accessed by the netizens from any
region in the world.”

Regardless of the ultimate outcome, Google has put the
government in a tough spot. Authorities have already reacted angrily to
Google’s actions, but as of this writing have not yet blocked complete access
to the Hong Kong search engine, Gmail, or any of the other Google services that
are currently available in China (Some Google sites, such as YouTube and
Blogger, were already blocked. Google has set up a page monitoring access to
their services in China). Because it is outside the Great Firewall, links to
individual search results on the Hong Kong search engine may be inaccessible
and some search queries will cause the user’s Web browser to be reset; on
Google.cn, those results would not have appeared at all. Millions of people in
China who access Google every day will now suddenly see precisely which search
results their government does not want them to see. And, chances are, they
won’t like it.

On Monday, just after learning that Google had rerouted its
site, prominent journalist and blogger Michael Anti tweeted that the move
is a “waking-up call for all Chinese netizens: We are not 2nd class. Like all,
we deserve an uncensored Internet.”

Sophie Beach is the executive editor of China Digital Times. She is a former senior Asia research associate at the Committee to Protect Journalists and received her master's degree from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She is based in Berkeley, Calif.